Barzakh

[11] According to Ibn Hazm, Barzakh is also the place for unborn souls, which are elsewhere described as residing in the lowest of the seven heavens, where an angel blows them into the wombs of women.

[14] Mentioned only three times in the Quran, and just once specifically as the barrier between the corporeal and ethereal, Barzakh is portrayed as a place in which, after death, the spirit is separated from the body – freed to contemplate the wrongdoing of its former life.

In the hadith tradition, Ibn al-Qayyim writes that souls in al-Barzakh are grouped with others matching in purity or impurity.

[21] Since one's soul is divorced from their body in Barzakh, the belief is that no progress or improvements to one's past life can be made.

[21] If a person experienced a life of sin and worldly pleasures, one cannot try to perform good deeds in order to reach Jannah.

However, there is belief that the fire which represents the own bad deeds can already be seen in Barzakh, and that the spiritual pain caused by this can lead to purification of the soul.

In Sufism the Barzakh or Alam-e-Araf is not only where the soul resides after death, but also a place it can visit during sleep and meditation.

Before he died, he told his sons to open his tomb forty days after his death to receive the message of Barzakh.

explained that for Khalid to give the knowledge of Barzakh he would have had to travel through the different worlds and then return; because he was not exhumed, his message was never heard.

It is believed that the terms and conditions to understand Barzakh are limited in scope and full comprehension because it is Shia's belief that it is incomprehensible, to a certain degree, until one actually reaches the realm beyond our physical world.

Though despite this obstacle, the Shia Imams, as cited through various sayings, have explained Barzakh to a significant degree as compared to other sects within Islam.

Some Christian denominations (notably Catholicism) include a notion of "purgatory": a place where souls, though ultimately destined for heaven, must pause and do penance for the sins they committed in life.

Aʿrāf is also thought of as a place where souls go whose good and bad deeds are too evenly matched to go directly to Paradise or the Fire.